Enlightenment

Pick it up: If you're lonely and want to find a fellow loner on the page. Thomas Hart is a lovely character that you will want to spend time with. There is sadness, there is heartbreak, there is estrangement, there is the complexity of faith...but there is also hope, and sometimes we might need to look up at the stars to feel this.

If equal affection cannot be

Let the more loving one be me. 

(W. H Auden)

Some books are hard to summarise. A novel about astronomy, religion, friendship, unrequited love…Enlightenment by Sarah Perry is all of these things. What will stay with me though is the atmosphere of the bleak Essex landscape, Perry’s beautiful and unhurried telling of a complex tale, and the character of Thomas Hart.

Thomas is a slightly old-world/out-of-time middle-aged newspaper columnist in the Essex town of Aldleigh who discovers a hidden passion for the stars when he is forced to do a column on the approaching Hale-Bopp Comet. The year is 1997. Hart is a slightly reluctant member of the local Baptist Church - reluctant because he finds his identity at odds with his faith and the views of the Church (Thomas Hart is gay), but a member nonetheless because it allows him to remain engaged with Grace Macaulay, a 17-year-old he has known since she was an infant, and feels responsible for in some ways. The two, though two decades apart, are friends and allies. Grace,, with a pious and strict father, also struggles with her faith. On the verge of adulthood, her curiosity about the wider world is stoked by a boy she meets one day. 

One day, Thomas receives a letter from James Bower, who runs the local museum. Bower wants to enlist Thomas’s help in pursuing the mystery surrounding a local manor house - Lowlands House - owned in the 19th century by a certain John Bell, who lived there with his wife Maria Vaduva. It is believed that Vaduva haunts the now uninhabited manor; she is known locally as the “Lowlands Ghost”. His interest piqued, Thomas visits James, and in the course of their interaction, finds himself falling for him. James is wholly unaware. But their obsession with Vaduva grows. They uncover evidence that she was an amateur astronomer and may have discovered something quite special, that has never been known or acknowledged. 

As the story goes on, Thomas and Grace both suffer heartbreak, Grace finds herself far from Aldleigh and separated from Thomas, and we meet them again 10 years later, and 20 years later, while the unsolved mystery of Maria Vaduva continues to form the backdrop to their lives.